Why I am a Dostoevskyan Humanist

An explanation in 5 parts, by reference to the works of those who were not.*

'Lo! I show you the Last Man.

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.

"We have discovered happiness" -- say the Last Men, and they blink.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death.

One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

"Formerly all the world was insane," -- say the subtlest of them, and they blink.

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled -- otherwise it upsets their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

"We have discovered happiness," -- say the Last Men, and they blink.'

Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, Hans Holbein

“All actual life is encounter.”
Martin Buber, I and Thou

“It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote 

“Wherever an altar is found, there is civilization."

Joseph de Maistre

* model for composition stolen gratuitously from an online challenge. 

Something Amiss

Looks like this curious non-review of the novel Laurus seems to have been referring to "Brahmins" as "Brahman" - I suppose republished to correct the mistake:

​Russian Brahman by Alan Jacobs | Articles | First Things

www.firstthings.com/article/2016/04/russian-brahman

First Things

​Russian Brahman. by Alan Jacobs April 2016. Laurus by eugene vodolazkin translated by lisa hayden oneworld, 384 pages, $24.99. Eugene Vodolazkin's ...

​Russian Brahmin by Alan Jacobs | Articles | First Things

www.firstthings.com/article/2016/04/russian-brahmin

First Things

​Russian Brahmin. by Alan Jacobs April 2016. Laurus by eugene vodolazkin translated by lisa hayden oneworld, 384 pages, $24.99. Eugene Vodolazkin's ...

Whatever his problematic grasp on Hindu concepts, it's obvious Jacobs knows little to nothing about the tradition of Russian yurodivy, which makes this review overall kind of silly at best. Interested readers can refer to the hagiographies of Xenia of Petersburg or Feofil of the Kiev Caves Lavra to become acquainted with some of the conceptual background to the novel, both published by the monastery press in Jordanville, NY in English. As a complement the Pavel Lungin movie Ostrov is worth watching carefully - the film is based partly on Feofil, though like the life of St Xenia, it explores the theme of vicarious repentance. (It was not until the third time I saw the film that I fully grasped it - the visuals are stunning and in many respects a distraction.)

On a similar vein, the reviewer seems to be unaware of the standard - far too standard to be universal in fact - Eastern Christian view of the spiritual life: purification, illumination and theosis. This is particularly strong in the present tense Eastern Orthodox tradition with the popularization on the compendium of texts on prayer from the patristic and medieval eras known as the Philokalia, so there should be no surprise that it is echoed by a Russian Orthodox novelist writing about a fictional early Russian spiritual figure. These are themes that recur in entirely secular Russian literature as well as, for example, the surrealist Vladimir Sorokin. Mistaking normative Eastern Christianity with Hindu/Dharmic spirituality seems like a fundamental error that even a high school student would have avoided. I am astonished by this given the relative popularity of the Way of the Pilgrim, which contextualized the Philokalia in 19th century Russian spirituality explicitly. This, I fear, provides an acute illustration of the siloing of intellectual life in America these days (if not a somewhat obvious poverty).

All of that aside, what continues to trouble me in general is the fact that most of the reviews of Laurus that I've seen have been oriented toward theological critiques - endorsements or arguments revolving around the reviewer's reading of what the author might want us to think about religion. And yet it is obvious that Vodolazkin did not write a religious apologetic (Jacobs invokes Karamazov, which is simultaneously a religious argument and a humanistic work - but Laurus is anything but the former). Laurus deserves a review as a work of notable - even great - world literature: which is to say first and foremost an exploration of what Vodolazkin is attempting to accomplish as a writer and what that has produced as a work of literature. The lack of serious analysis is particularly puzzling given the devices Vodolazkin uses to deal with language, identity, personality, relationship, and - yes - time. We could do with a few less sermons and a bit more thought.

Nativity

Shadows flicker against the wall
within the cave it is perpetually night
(I find my vision gets dimmer with age
- when we are alleged to see more sharply -
in the low light of a single candle flame
it is getting much harder to read
year by year)
there is a form I barely am able to perceive.
I wonder if it is better here than the open air
where my eyes would surely be closed against the sun
where all forms find their origin in the one.

2015

Brazil

Blown away to get my purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu from 10th Planet black belt Alex Canders.

Genevieve, Protectress of Paris

Like a white stone in the depths of a well...

Like a white stone in the depths of a well...
Anna Akhmatova
working translation by Greg Pavlik

Like a white stone in the depths of a well
within me there lies one memory.
I can not - and do not - want to expel
this, my greatest joy and my agony.

I think that anyone who closely looks
can see this recollection reads
as harrowing sadness in a tragic book -
a warning, and a sign of need.

I know the gods forever strive
to wreck the body but cannot touch the mind;
assurance that you will forever live
as a memory I can’t leave behind.

Original:
Как белый камень в глубине колодца,
Лежит во мне одно воспоминанье.
Я не могу и не хочу бороться:
Оно - веселье и оно - страданье.

Мне кажется, что тот, кто близко взглянет
В мои глаза, его увидит сразу.
Печальней и задумчивее станет
Внимающего скорбному рассказу.

Я ведаю, что боги превращали
Людей в предметы, не убив сознанья,
Чтоб вечно жили дивные печали.
Ты превращен в мое воспоминанье.

Requiem Fragment

Requiem Fragment
Anna Akhmatova
translation by Greg Pavlik

10 Crucifixion

      Do not lament me, O Mother,
      seeing me in the tomb.

The angelic chorus glorified the hour of eternity,
when the heavens convulsed in a river of fire:
He cried to His Father “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”
And to His Mother, he spoke: “Do not lament me”…

1938

Mary Magdalena writhed, and wept
as the beloved John froze like stone (or salt).
Where the Mother stood in silence -
no one dared to look.

1940

Translator notes. I chose to translate this poem much less loosely than my interpretative translation of Akhmatova’s Lot’s Wife – there Russian readers will recognize that the final stanza is essentially my own poem (with an explicit reference to the unrelated work of Scott Cairns, in fact).

Instead, this section of Requiem is much closer to the original (1), with only minimal augmentation. Nonetheless, it is also very different from Akhmatova’s in certain critical respects. Requiem itself is a difficult and evocative work – its melancholy is inseparable from the suffering of both Akhmatova herself and the Soviet people under Stalin. In some sense, I have abandoned this context in my translation. Educated Russian readers would have recognized Akhmatova’s work as using the imagery of the hymnography of the Paschal Nocturnes, the final liturgical setting of Great and Holy Saturday chanted before the entombed body of the dead Christ, which includes a deeply moving dialogue with his Mother. (2)

I have chosen to deepen the liturgical elements of the poem and play off themes that recur in and around the Lenten Triodion. The text of the Slavonic service is rendered here in English as it is commonly used in American parishes within the Russian Orthodox tradition. Second, I use the Hebrew directly in quotation from the Psalter, emphasizing its position as a liturgical prayer. While the dialogic element from the Nocturnes service is repeated, maintaining the liturgical connection, here the address to the Mother is clearly one of human filial affection.

The river of fire is evocative of the image God as “consuming fire”, which, St Isaac says is experienced as bliss by the pure in heart. The second stanza – and I do not believe there is any intention at all in the original to do this – also points back to the story of Lot and Sodom and implicitly re-invokes the image of fire. Akhmatova makes no association with salt. I have tried intentionally not to recall the poetics of Stabat Mater in the final lines.

(1) Original Russian:

10
РАСПЯТИЕ

   Не рыдай Мене, Мати,
   во гробе зрящия.

Хор ангелов великий час восславил,
И небеса расплавились в огне.
Отцу сказал: "Почто Меня оставил!"
А матери: "О, не рыдай Мене..."

1938

Магдалина билась и рыдала,
Ученик любимый каменел,
А туда, где молча Мать стояла,
Так никто взглянуть и не посмел.

1940, Фонтанный Дом

(2) From the Eastern Orthodox Liturgical Service of Paschal Nocturnes:

Do not lament me, O Mother, seeing me in the tomb, the Son conceived in the womb without seed, for I shall arise and be glorified with eternal glory as God. I shall exalt all who magnify thee in faith and in love.

Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee!

I escaped sufferings and was blessed beyond nature at Thy strange birth, O Son, who art without beginning. But now, beholding Thee, my God, dead and without breath, I am sorely pierced by the sword of sorrow. But arise, that I may be magnified.

Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee!

By my own will, the earth covers me, O Mother, but the gatekeepers of hell tremble at seeing me clothed in the blood-stained garments of vengeance; for when I have vanquished my enemies on the cross, I shall arise as God and magnify thee.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Let creation rejoice, let all born on earth be glad, for hateful hell has been despoiled, let the women with myrrh come to meet me, for I am redeeming Adam and Eve and all their descendants, and on the third day shall I arise.

Lot's Wife

Lot's Wife
by Anna Akhmatova
an interpretive translation by Greg Pavlik

The righteous Lot heard the voice of God
As if coming from the distant and black mountains.
But his wife,
She saw what was until yesterday her blessing.

Under the beautiful spires of Sodom,
Where she sang spinning cloth -
The empty window of the room,
In which her children were born.

She looked – and her pain died with her,
For she could look no more:
Her body translucent salt,
Her feet joined the earth.

Who will mourn for Marah?
An insignificant role in a grand saga -
Yet my conscience cannot forget
The one who gave her life for a fleeting glance.

-----

Original poem

И праведник шел за посланником Бога,
Огромный и светлый, по черной горе.
Но громко жене говорила тревога:
Не поздно, ты можешь еще посмотреть
На красные башни родного Содома,
На площадь, где пела, на двор, где пряла,
На окна пустые высокого дома,
Где милому мужу детей родила.
Взглянула – и, скованы смертною болью,
Глаза ее больше смотреть не могли;
И сделалось тело прозрачною солью,
И быстрые ноги к земле приросли.
Кто женщину эту оплакивать будет?
Не меньшей ли мнится она из утрат?
Лишь сердце мое никогда не забудет
Отдавшую жизнь за единственный взгляд.

Ancestor Worship

Some profound lessons in how to be human that we can learn from our Confucian friends

Fascinating Lives

There is something, I think, admirable in a quiet life: care for family, constructive participation in community, hard work. But there are times and places (perhaps all times, but not all places?) where simply attending to the simple things of life becomes a kind of impossibility: whether for psychological or moral reasons. I was reflecting on two persons recently who have struck me by not only their intellectual genius but also by the sheer force by which they pushed against the norm, one for reasons of psychology and one for reasons of morality.

Yukio Mishima: narcissist, political fanatic, suicide. And one of Japan's greatest novelists. I recently completed the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which traces the life of Shigekuni Honda from youth to retirement as a wealthy attorney, centered around what Honda believes are the successive reincarnations of his friend Kiyoaki Matsugae: as a young rightist, a Thai princess and an orphan. The most powerful of the four novels, in my opinion is the second: Runaway Horses. The book seems to rebuke the militant nationalism of Japanese reactionaries, though ironically enough Mishima himself ends his own life under the banner of a similar ideology. Mishima's fascinating portrait of an inherent dark side of youth - a taming of a deep inhumanism - so to speak, comes through almost all the novels, but most strongly in the last. This echoes a theme he developed in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, though I can think of few works that more strongly explore this theme than the Lord of the Flies. In any case, Mishima is masterful in exploring aberrant developmental psychology - even as he, himself, seems to have been stricken with his own disordered personality.

Maria Skobtsova: atheist, symbolist poet, Bolshevik revolutionary - and a renegade nun arrested for helping Jews in Paris by the Gestapo, she allegedly died by taking the place of a Jewish woman being sent to death. Jim Forrest provides a useful overview of her life - unlike most lives of a Christian saints, this is no hagiography: it is a straightforward story of life. At the same time, we see a life transformed by a dawning realization that self-denial is a path to transformation -

"The way to God lies through love of people. At the Last Judgment I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercises, nor how many bows and prostrations I made. Instead I shall be asked did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners. That is all I shall be asked. About every poor, hungry and imprisoned person the Savior says ‘I': ‘I was hungry and thirsty, I was sick and in prison.’ To think that he puts an equal sign between himself and anyone in need. . . . I always knew it, but now it has somehow penetrated to my sinews. It fills me with awe."

And despite a life dedicated to service, she remained an acute intellectual, a characteristic of so many Russian emigres in Paris. This too reflected her view that redemption and suffering where intertwined - my favorite piece On the Imitation of the Mother of God

- draws this out beautifully.

Poets of Zen Buddhism

"Americans of many backgrounds, who not many decades ago admired and cultivated a lean, resolute character, were hungry for access to these traditions—the bitter tea of Ch’an Buddhism, a poetry with the taste of gnarled wood. After all, how many among us first learned poetry skills by rewriting some old Chinese poem? How many among us got our first taste of Zen by copying a detail out of the life of some Chinese hermit met in a book? Or saw an ink-brush scroll in which a thin stream drops from cloud-piercing pinnacles—then noticed a tiny pavilion, one quiet scholar gazing into the void—all done in a few confident strokes?..."

Aporias

1.

Actually

He likes word games

   Diffident

In the way they circle about

   Starlings in flight

   Or Seraphim.

2.

With sweeping gesture

   Left to right

Hands hang with head

Under the pressing of the sun:

   Weight of doubt

   Or will.

3.

Against open air, tumultuous sea

   Turtle green

The division is nowhere more evident

Where sand meets froth

   Stark, blinding glare

Wind balmed

   Until night.

4.

Cleanliness,

   Next to godliness

The echo of countless schoolmarms

Chiding, chilling - without regret

   Yeah, rather,

   Motherhood.

3 film non-meme

Riffing off previous post - was discussing with my wife last evening what we thought the three best "recent" films we had seen were. Here's my list:

1) Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin.

Reason: this is a powerful, powerful film that explores the effects of radical individualism, and economic inequality and of the overturning of normal, local, rooted communities. Banned by the Chinese government, it is as much a critique of the values of neoliberalism globally as it is of the current Chinese economic experiment.

2) Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful.

Reason: a moving exploration of responsibility and ethics in the face of poverty, hopelessness and impending death. What do we make of the human spirit and our obligations to each other - and our obligations in the face of The Other?  Javier Bardem was birthed for this role - fantastic acting.

3) Pavel Lungin's The Island.

Reason: who is guilty before whom and for what? Take a director of Jewish background, give him a story that is loosely inspired by a hagiography of the fool-for-Christ Feofil of the Kieven Caves, and cast a retired-rock-star-current-recluse (Pyotr Mamonov) as a Orthodox monastic in the far north of Russia, and I would have quite low expectations for the outcome. What Lungin produced is instead not only his best film but I think one of the best films of the last 20 years.

Top 10 Book Meme

What books have most impacted me? I picked books I have returned to over and over. Yes, I know this is solipsistic to publish, but its a fascinating thing to think through. I'm sure the list will not look right in a few months anyway. But here I go...

1 The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Reason: the best book ever written about the human condition.

2 Iob, LXX
Reason: bad things happen to good people, quite often.

3 I Am a Cat, Natsume Soseki
Reason: comedy is good for the soul. This is the funniest book I've ever read. Cheating here, but I'd probably add Gogol as a next choice.

4 The Symposium, Plato
Reason: love. And I'm an only partially reconstructed platonist.

5 Demons, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Reason: explains a big part of the 20th century. Makes 1984 look like crude propaganda.

6 Also Spracht Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

Reason: Nietszche saw the enormity of the modern project clearly.

7 Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa

Reason: before structuralism, post structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction, there was Gregory of Nyssa. And apokatastasis.

8 For the Time Being, WH Auden

Reason: aside from the fact that Auden is the best English language poet, this is a deeply moving meditation on Christmas in the anglophone experience. Read it several times each winter.

9 The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

Reason: great art meets allegory meets beauty in the search for meaning. Honestly, stuck with only one book this might be it.

10 Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Reason: we are all compromised to one degree or another.

Silence

Silence. Sometimes sought after, but in reality almost certainly feared - the absence of not just sound but voice. Silence is often associated with divine encounter - the neptic tradition of the Philokalia comes to mind - but also and perhaps more accurately with abandonment, divine or otherwise. I recently read Shusaku Endo's Silence, a remarkable work, dwelling on the theme of abandonment in the context of the extirpation of Kakure Kirishitan communities in Tokagawa Japan. Many resilient families survived and eventually came out of hiding in the liberalization in the mid-19th century, but the persecutions were terrible. Their story is deeply moving (sufficiently so that over time I find myself drawn to devotion to the image of Maria-Kannon). Endo's novel was not without controversy but remains one of the great literary accomplishments of the 20th century.

In fact, the reason for this post is a kind of double entendre on silence: the relative silence in literate western circles with respect to Japanese literature of the past century. Over the last month, I realized that virtually no one I had spoken with had read a single Japanese novel. Yet, like Russia of the 19th century, Japan produced a concentration of great writers and great novelists in the last 20th century that is set apart: the forces of of profound national changes (and defeat) created the crucible of great art. That art carries the distinctive aesthetic sense of Japan - a kind of openness of form, but is necessarily the carrier of universal, humanistic themes.

Endo is a writer in the post war period - the so-called third generation, and in my view the last of the wave of great Japanese literature. Read him. But don't stop - perhaps don't start - there. The early 20th century work of Natsume Soseki are a product of the Meiji period. In my view, Soseki is not only a father of Japenese literature but one of the greatest figures of world literature taken as a whole - I am a Cat remains one of my very favorite novels. Two troubling post-war novels by Yukio Mishima merit attention - Confessions of a Mask and the Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, both I would characterize broadly as existential masterpieces. The topic of identity in the face of westernization is also a moving theme in Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human. I hardly mean this as a complete survey - something in any case I am not qualified to provide -just a pointer toward something broader and important.

My encounter with contemporary Japanese literature - albeit limited - has been less impactful (I want to like Haruki Murakami in the same way I want to like Victor Pelevin, but both make me think of the distorted echo of something far better). And again like Russia, it is difficult to know what to make of Japan today - where its future will lead, whether it will see a cultural resurgence or decline. It is certain that its roots are deep and I hope she finds a way to draw on them and to flourish.

Spark: A Discussion

A great presentation, worth watching in its entirety.

With apologies to my Hadoop friends but this is good for you too.

Exactly Wrong

I normally avoid anything that smacks of a competitive discussion on what I consider to be a space for personal reflection. So while I want to disclose the fact that I am not disinterested in the points I am making from a professional standpoint, my main interest is to frame some architecture points that I think are extremely important for the maturation and success of the Hadoop ecosystem.

A few weeks back, Mike Olson of Cloudera spoke at Spark Summit on how Spark relates to the future of Hadoop. The presentation can be found here:

http://youtu.be/8kcdwnbHnJo

In particular I want to draw attention to the statement made at 1:45 in the presentation that describes Spark as the "natural successor to MapReduce" - it becomes clear very quickly that what Olson is talking about is batch processing. This is fascinating as everyone I've talked to immediately points out one obvious thing: Spark isn't a general purpose batch processing framework - that is not its design center. The whole point of Spark is to enable fast data access and interactivity.
 
The guys that clearly "get" Spark - unsurprisingly - are DataBricks. In talking with Ion and company, it's clear they understand the use cases where Spark shines - data scientist driven data exploration and algorithmic development, machine learning, etc. - things that take advantage of the memory mapping capabilities and speed of the framework. And they have offered an online service that allows users to rapidly extract value from cloud friendly datasets, which is smart.

Cloudera's idea of pushing SQL, Pig and other frameworks on to Spark is actually a step backwards - it is a proposal to recreate all the problems of MapReduce 1: it fails to understand the power of refactoring resource management away from the compute model. Spark would have to reinvent and mature models for multi-tenancy, resource managemnet, scheduling, security, scaleout, etc that are frankly already there today for Hadoop 2 with YARN.

The announcement of an intent to lead an implementation of Hive on Spark got some attention. This was something that I looked at carefully with my colleagues almost 2 years ago, so I'd like to make a few observations on why we didn't take this path then.

The first was maturity, in terms of the Spark implementation, of Hive itself, and Shark. Candidly, we knew Hive itself worked at scale but needed significant enhancement and refactoring for both new features on the SQL front and to work at interactive speeds. And we wanted to do all this in a way that did not compromise Hive's ability to work at scale - for real big data problems. So we focused on the mainstream of Hive and the development of a Dryad like runtime for optimal execution of operators in physical plans for SQL in a way that meshed deeply with YARN. That model took the learnings of the database community and scale out big data solutions and built on them "from the inside out", so to speak.

Anyone who has been tracking Hadoop for, oh, the last 2-3 years will understand intuitively the right architectural approach needs to be based on YARN. What I mean is that the query execution must - at the query task level - be composed of tasks that are administered directly by YARN. This is absolutely critical for multi-workload systems (this is one reason why a bolt on MPP solution is a mistake for Hadoop - it is at best a tactical model while the system evolves).  This is why we are working with the community on Tez, a low level framework for enabling YARN native domain specific execution engines. For Hive-on-Tez, Hive is the engine and Tez provides the YARN level integration for resource negotiation and coorindation for DAG execution: a DAG of native operators analogous the the execution model found in the MPP world (when people compare Tez and Spark, they are fundamentally confused - Spark could be run on Tez for example for a much deeper integration with Hadoop 2 for example). This model allows the full range of use cases from interactive to massive batch to be administered in a deeply integrated, YARN native way.

Spark will undoubtedly mature into a great tool for what it is designed for: in memory, interactive scenarios - generally script driven - and likely grow to subsume new use cases we aren't anticipating today. It is, however, exactly the wrong choice for scale out big data batch processing in anything like the near term; worse still, returning to a monolithic general purpose compute framework for all Hadoop models would be a huge regression and is a disastrously bad idea.

Dependent Rational Animals

I wanted to briefly comment on Alisdair MacIntyre's lectures collected as "Dependent Rational Animals", but let me precede that with a couple of comments for context: first, as I alluded in my last post referencing Levinas, it is my view that the the ethics demands a certain primacy in any healthy conception of life and society; second, in the area of ethics, Macintyre's After Virtue is the book that has had perhaps the biggest impact on my own thinking.

One of the criticisms of MacIntyre is that his critique of rational ethics is, on the one hand, devastating; on the other hand, his positive case for working out a defense of his own position - a revivification of social ethics in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition(s) was somewhat pro forma. I think this is legitimate in so far as it relates to After Virtue itself (I believe I have read the latest edition - 3 - most recently), though I am not enough of a MacIntyre expert to offer a defensible critique of his work overall.

I do, however, want to draw attention to Dependent Rational Animals specifically in this light. Here MacIntyre begins with is the position of human as animal - as a kind of naturalist starting point for developing another pass at the importance of the tradition of the virtues. What is most remarkable is that in the process of exploring the implications of our "animality" MacIntyre manages to subvert yet another trajectory of twentieth century philosophy, this time as it relates to the primacy of linguistics. The net effect is to restore philosophical discourse back toward the reality of the human condition in the context of the broader evolutionary context of life on earth without - and this I must say is the most amazing part of this book - resorting to fables-masked-as-science (evolutionary psychology).

George EP Box

"Essentially, all models are wrong. Some models are useful."

The Other

It is the nature of short essays or speeches that they can at best explore the surface of an idea. This is a surprisingly difficult task, since ideas worth exploring usually need to be approached with some rigor. The easy use of the speech form is to promote an idea to listeners or readers who already share a common view - that is one reason speeches are effective forms for political persuasion for rallying true believers. It's much more difficult to create new vantage points or vistas into a new world - a sense of something grander that calls for further exploration.

Yet this is exactly what Ryszard Kapuscinski accomplishes in his series of talks published as The Other. Here, the Polish journalist builds on his experience and most importantly on the reflections on the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanual Levinas to reflect on how the encounter with the Other in a broad, cross cultural sense is the defining event - and opportunity - in late (or post) modernity. For Kapuscinski, the Other is the specifically the non-European cultures in which he spent most of his career as a journalist. For another reader it might be someone very much like Kapuscinski himself.

There are three simple points that Kapuscinski raises that bear attention:

1) The era we live in provides a unique, interpersonal opportunity for encounter with the Other - which is to say that we are neither in the area of relative isolation from the Other that dominated much of human history nor are we any longer in the phase of violent domination that marked the period of European colonial expansion. We have a chance to make space for encounter to be consistently about engagement and exchange, rather than conflict.

2) This encounter cannot primarily technical, its must be interpersonal. Technical means are not only anonymous but more conducive to inculcating mass culture rather than creating space for authentic personal engagement. The current period of human history - post industrial, urbanized, technological - is given to mass culture, mass movements, as a rule - this is accelerated by globalization and communications advances. And while it is clear that the early "psychological" literature of the crowd - and I am thinking not only of the trajectory set by Gustave LeBon, but the later and more mature reflections of Ortega y Gasset - were primarily reactionary, nonetheless they point consistently to the fact that the crowd involves not just a loss of identity, but a loss of the individual: it leaves little room for real encounter and exchange.

While the increasing ability to encounter different cultures offers the possibility of real engagement,  at the same time modern mass culture is the number one threat to the Other - in that it subordinates the value of whatever is unique to whatever is both common and most importantly sellable. In visiting Ukraine over the last few years, what fascinated me the most were the things that made the country uniquely Ukrainian. Following a recent trip, I noted the following in a piece by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on a visit to Karapchiv: "The kids here learn English and flirt in low-cut bluejeans. They listen to Rihanna, AC/DC and Taylor Swift. They have crushes on George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, watch “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy,” and play Grand Theft Auto. The school here has computers and an Internet connection, which kids use to watch YouTube and join Facebook. Many expect to get jobs in Italy or Spain — perhaps even America."

What here makes the Other both unique and beautiful is being obliterated by mass culture. Kristof is, of course, a cheerleader for this tragedy, but the true opportunity Kapuscinski asks us to look for ways to build up and offer support in encounter.

3) Lastly and most importantly, for encounter with the Other to be one of mutual recognition and sharing, the personal encounter must have an ethical basis. Kapuscinski observes that the first half of the last century was dominated by Husserl and Heidegger - in other words by epistemic and ontological models. It is no accident, I think, that the same century was marred by enormities wrought by totalizing ideologies - where ethics is subordinated entirely, ideology can rage out of control. Kapuscinski follows Levinas in response - ultimately seeing the Other as a source of ethical responsibility is an imperative of the first order.

The diversity of human cultures is, as Solzhenitzyn rightly noted, the "wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of God's design." And yet is only if we can encounter the Other in terms of mutual respect and self-confidence, in terms of exchange and recognition of value in the Other, that we can actually see the Other as a treasure - one that helps ground who I am as much as reveals the treasure for what it is. And this is our main challenge - the other paths, conflict and exclusion, are paths we cannot afford to tread.

Telling Tales

After struggling to find time for many months, I finally was able to sit down and watch without interruption Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf performance - an adaptation that relies on Bagby's voice and a reconstruction of a 6th century 6 tone Anglo-Saxon harp. The performance is engrossing and provokes a strong imaginative response, one that would have been communally experienced. Of course the only way to revive a sense of communal experience in the case of Bagby is to see him perform live - however, given the performance is entirely in Old English and as such most unintelligible without subtitles, I think a digital adaptation may be a necessary tradeoff. In many ways, Bagby's Beowulf is a reminder of how impoverished our notion of entertainment is - ephemeral, base, isolating and essentially throw away as a rule.

By the way, it's not entirely the case that the English are unable to create something of the same texture today - several times during the performance I thought of Judith Weir's one person, unaccompanied opera King Harald's Saga. Weir's work is much shorter, principally a musical composition and less poetically rich, so it is difficult to compare the two directly: Beowulf remains the provenance of a balladeer first and foremost, and this is a genre that more and more feels lost to our world - poetry today rarely seems to be meant to be read aloud and even more rarely follows epic formats. This is a lost social phenomena, for which we are impoverished: in fact, the last long work of a balladeer I read was Ethiopian Enzira Sebhat, itself a medieval work dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The closest - though only indirectly comparable - works to the Enzira Sebhat that I am aware of currently being composed are akathistos hymns of the Russian Orthodox tradition. And while many of those recent compositions are less-than-accomplished literary works, they unquestionably represent a rich and living and at times very beautiful means of transmission of communal memory and values. I am not aware of any recent akathistos compositions that have the expressive beauty and originality of the Byzantine hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, the modern akathist has sometimes proven a source of inspiration for exceptionally great art: the late Sir John Tavener's setting of the "thanksgiving akathist" being perhaps the most significant case in point.

Hope for Humanity

When even vice.com gets excited about Arvo Part, you know there is hope for humanity....

Memories of the way we were...

The fascinating thing about Hadoop is the obviousness of its evolutionary needs. For example, MapReduce coupled with reliable scale out storage was a powerful - even revolutionary - effect for organizations with both lots of and multi-structured data. Out of the gate, Hadoop unlocked data "applications" that were for all intents and purposes unimplementable. At the same time, it didn't take much imagination to see that separating the compute model from resource management would be essential for future applications that did not fit well with MapReduce itself. It took a lot of work and care to get YARN defined, implemented and hardened, but the need for YARN itself was fairly obvious. Now it is here and Hadoop is no longer about "batch" data processing.

Note, however, it takes a lot of work to make the evolutionary changes available. In some cases, bolt on solutions have emerged to fill the gap. For key value data management, HBase is a perfect example. Several years ago, Eric Baldeschwieler was pointing out that HDFS could have filled that role. I think he was right, but the time it would take to get "HBase-type" functionality implemented via HDFS would have been a very long path indeed. In that case, the community filled the gap with HBase and it is being "back integrated" into Hadoop via YARN in a way that will make for a happier co-existence.

Right now we are seeing multiple new bolt on attempts to add functionality to Hadoop. For example, there are projects to add MPP databases on top of Hadoop itself. It's pretty obvious that this is at best a stop gap again - and one that comes at a pretty high price - I don't know of anyone that seriously thinks that a bolt on MPP is ultimately the right model for the Hadoop ecosystem. Since the open source alternatives look to be several years away from being "production ready", that raises an interesting question: is Hadoop evolution moving ahead at a similar or even more rapid rate to provide a native solution - a solution that will be more scalable, more adaptive and more open to a wider range of use cases and applications - including alternative declarative languages and compute models?

I think the answer is yes: while SQL on Hadoop via Hive is really the only open source game in town for production use cases - and its gotten some amazing performance gains in the first major iteration on Tez that we'll talk more about in the coming days - its clear that the Apache communities are beginning to deliver a new series of building blocks for data management at scale and speed: Optiq's Cost Based Optimizer; Tez for structuring multi-node operator execution; ORC and vectorization for optimal storage and compute; HCat for DDL. But what's missing? Memory management. And man has it ever been missing - that should have been obvious as well (and it was - one reason that so many people are interested in Spark for efficient algorithm development).

What we've seen so far has been two extremes available when it comes to supporting memory management (especially for SQL) - all disk and all memory. An obvious point here is that neither is ultimately right for Hadoop. This is a long winded intro to point to two, interrelated pieces by Julian Hyde and Sanjay Radia unveiling a model that is being introduced across multiple components called Discardable In-memory Materialized Query (DIMMQ). Once you see this model, it becomes obvious that the future of Hadoop for SQL - and not just SQL - is being implemented in real time. Check out both blog posts:

http://hortonworks.com/blog/dmmq/

http://hortonworks.com/blog/ddm/

Berdyaev on Dostoevsky

I just finished reading Nicholai Berdyaev's interpretative study on Dostoevsky. On the one hand, this is a work that will be difficult to digest without reading at least the four major novels: Demons (or The Possessed), Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and Brothers Karamazov - as well, I might add, as the Adolescent (or A Raw Youth, as it is sometimes titled). Berdyaev pursues his themes by reference to both characters and arguments that appear in those works. On the other hand, he does such a fine job of concisely presenting major thematic elements and positions that may be non-obvious to American or english language readers, that I would with some hesitation recommend it as a "preface" to reading Doestoevsky's novels. In the latter case, some substantial portion of the discussion would be lost on the reader, but the context it provides overall would certainly be helpful to those approaching the great author's oeuvre for the first time. In particular, the theme of "spiritual" freedom as a necessary condition for human development seems be a correct reading of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev works this idea out from a number of angles. And happily Berdyaev is quite comfortable criticizing some of Dostoevsky's pointedly bad ideas as well.

There are two things I would note as well - Berdyaev is a fascinating critic and character in the development of Russian philosophy, specifically the religious inspired philosophers that in some way were heirs to Soloviev; Berdyaev operates in the role of a philosophical social commentator as opposed to a primarily theological tradition - in this case he is very different than contemporaries like Sergius Bulgakov or Pavel Florensky. I am most familiar with him through his earlier work, including the Meaning of the Creative Act. This book, of course, echoes Berdyaev's thinking, but he is quite clear in distinguishing his critique from the views of his subject, which makes the book all the more valuable in that it seems to avoid projecting his reading of Dostoevsky into Dostoevsky himself. Of course, others may disagree with this - and perhaps my own reading of both authors is colored by my own interpretation.

However, this certainly weighs on the question of how I would rank Berdyaev's critique of Dostoevsky: while it is not the subtlest discussion I have read, it is one of the simplest and in my view "most correct" readings of the author I have encountered. I would go so far as to suggest that Berdyaev's work deserves a primary place in the secondary literature on Dostoevsky. In fact, I would place it alongside Joseph Frank's monumental intellectual and literary biography as recommended companions to Dostoevsky's novels.

Addendum: I should have mentioned Berdyaev's final assesssment: "So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world." And that my friends is in my view true.

Abyssinian: Jazz at Lincoln Center Full Concert

It's my opinion that the pinnacle of artistic contribution from the American experience is found in Jazz (proof that art and suffering go hand in hand?). And I remain convinced that one of the most important exponents of Jazz as not just "high art" but truly great art is Wynton Marsalis.

Check out this Jazz-meets-Gospel concert in full. A uniquely American synthesis; uniquely wonderful.

And so it goes

Between just being flat out busy and frankly finding Twitter a much lazier way to share basic information, this blog has been dormant for too long. In May, it will get a lot more attention - too much is going on in the Big Data space and Hadoop area more specifically to keep so quiet about it. Time to speak up a bit...

Google Spanner

The key paper is here - worth reading over in its entirety.

One observation I have is that this is actually pretty straightforward. The genesis of these kinds of solutions may be companies like Google, but it is no longer safe to assume that this kind of infrastructure is meant for public cloud data centers only - redundancy and data scale problems are hitting nearly every business today and the lack of basic things like transactional integrity is fair tradeoff - but let's be clear, its a tradeoff all the same....

Coming Out

The last 16 years or so of my professional life have been dedicated to working on problems (and solutions!) in transactional middleware - by this, I mean systems that provide strong consistency guarantees: reliable queueing, distributed 2pc engines, higher level quality of service guarantees for lower level protocols (iiop, rmi, soap, etc), and workflow engines, in particular. Much of our thinking was influenced by the world of the relational database. And as a consequence the relational model with full consistency guarantees was the normal working model influenced much of our thinking. For a sense of how strong this tendency was, check out Jim Gray’s paper “Queues are Databases”.

In the early 2000s, we struggled with relaxing those guarantees in various ways to facilitate transaction-like behavior in internet contexts. And even in simple ways that superficially appeared to succeed, I think we failed: for example, BPEL has SAGA like behavior for compensations, the truth is very few people use it. Perhaps one of the most interesting exercises in that area was the Business Transaction Protocol: an unfortunate development in the standards world, but a revealing exercise in that it showed that many problems involving loosely coupled systems could not be handled with conventional solutions. But it was in group communication protocols that I really became convinced that the problem of scale required re-thinking many fundamental assumptions: there gossip protocols and other weakly consistent models began to find more applications. Clustering techniques that valued scale and speed over coordinated transactions were becoming important, even if their applications looked suspiciously like LINDA systems at times. And it was hard to ignore some of the more interesting work coming out of Ken Birman’s group (and subsequently introduced at Amazon: there is a reason AWS was an early success).

Meanwhile, we were seeing conventional middleware pushed to the limit on both volume and throughput. Large scale relational databases have continued to find ways to scale to a point, but with increasingly expensive hardware (and license) requirements. In working on very high throughput scenarios in workflow systems (hundreds of millions to billions of processes a day), I was becoming convinced that alternative infrastructure models would become not just more important, but critical. Those alternatives had to provide scale and at a reasonable expense. Before leaving Oracle I was looking at ways to layer BPEL over HBase and HDFS, as opposed to the conventional use of the relational database for : my working model was to eliminate most of the database requirements as an option and to fundamentally rethink process analytics by using Hadoop as a wholesale replacement for BAM style solutions. As a general pattern, some form of stream processing over Hadoop looks likely to emerge as a fundamental pattern.

At some point, I came to terms with the fact that parallel shared nothing architectures were the key to much of the future of data management. So today I am no longer spending much time on strictly transactional systems. Those systems are well understood and have earned their place as a “permanent” part of the IT landscape - they will continue to be important components of applications. But they will not provide the architecture or engine to deal with the vast amount of data that is being generated either within those applications or stored in other systems - from unstructured content to log files to data feeds. The requirements for scale, for capacity and - this is just as important - low cost cannot be met by the relational database model. The new generation of “cloud scale” technologies that are being built today are the future for most of that work. It is becoming increasingly obvious that Hadoop will provide the building blocks for the industry to store, manage and process these workloads.

It may seem obvious, but let me point out a few simple answer to "Why Hadoop in particular"? Companies are going to use what is available and has been shown to work, as long as it is an open platform. Hadoop can scale out. It can also scale down. It is free and open source. It can work with multi-structured data and loose schema constraints. It also runs on relatively inexpensive hardware. It has critical mass in uptake and adoption. No one company owns it - which is critical: as the industry rallies around it, the community itself will be strengthened along with the platform. My bet is that Hortonworks is right: 50% of the enterprise’s data will be processed in Hadoop in the next 5 years.

Big Data market roundup

Big Data market roundup
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2012/08/16/roundup-of-big-data-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2012/

Twitter account

Have given in: @PavlikGreg

Service Computation 2012

CFP extended to mid-March - see details here: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2012/CfPSERVICECOMPUTATION12.html

Twitter Liquidity

Interesting read: http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/14/go-costolo-go-cashing-out-options-should-be-a-privilege-not-a-right/

Big Files

Dave Berry starting new twitter feed on big data movement, something we were deeply worried about back when I was trying to do middleware for digital media assets. I expect he'll find some interesting stuff: http://twitter.com/@BigFiles

GITPRO World 2012

My friend and old colleague Khanderao Kand just flagged me with the latest update on the GITPRO 2012 conference. It's this Saturday starting at 9am in Palo Alto - panels on big data and cloud look very interesting.

Cloud commentary

Bruce Tierney from Oracle covered my cloud talk at Gartner's application architecture conference a few weeks back - he highlights some points I think are important.

Gartner

Speaking tomorrow at Gartner's Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit on cloud computing and integration in Vegas at 9:45am: if you are there, please stop by to talk.

WESOA 2011 CFP - Cyprus!

Have again this year happily agreed to work the program committee for wesoa, the always useful workshop attached to icsoc. This year, wesoa will be in Cyprus, which should make my attendance a bit more challenging than last year's event in San Francisco...

CALL FOR PAPERS

WESOA 2011

7th INT. WORKSHOP ON ENGINEERING SERVICE ORIENTED APPLICATIONS

Associated with ICSOC 2011
Dec. 5th 2011, Paphos, Cyprus
http://www.wesoa.org/

Paper Submission Due: September 15th 2011

OBJECTIVES
==========

Many of today's large-scale software projects in the area of distributed
systems and especially enterprise IT adopt service-oriented software
architecture design patterns and enabling technologies. For these
projects, availability of sound software engineering principles,
methodology and tool support is of utmost importance. However,
traditional software engineering approaches are not fully appropriate
for the development of service-oriented applications. The limitations of
traditional methods in the context of service-oriented computing have
led to the emergence of Software Service Engineering (SSE) as a
specialist discipline, but research in this area is still ongoing and
many open issues remain. There is a need for research community and
industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering principles,
methodologies and tool support for the entire software development
lifecycle (SDLC) for service-oriented applications. The WESOA 2011
workshop is the seventh in a series of workshops that focus on the
specific aspects of SSE.

The theme of this edition of the WESOA workshop, aligned with the ICSOC
2011 focus on Cloud Computing, is exploration of the synergies between
SSE, Cloud Computing and Service Mashups. In particular, with the lack
of concrete SSE methodologies and approaches the future focus of
combining SSE, Cloud Computing and Service Mashups is as exciting as it
is potentially dangerous. There are risks of providing end-users with
powerful compositional tools to create new service-based applications
without rigorous engineering control mechanisms. This area provides a
strong candidate for future research for quality assurance in SSE. We
especially encourage papers that address the combination of these topic
areas.

Our aim is to facilitate exchange and evolution of ideas on SSE topics
across multiple disciplines as well as to encourage participation of
both researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. In
particular, such collaboration shall be fostered by means of a highly
interactive and fast-paced workshop format with invited speakers. We
also intend to hold a discussion panel on the theme of the workshop to
encourage ideas for future research.

GENERAL TOPICS
==============

WESOA 2011 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes
papers that address general or domain-specific challenges of SSE.
Workshop topics of interest include, but are not limited to the
following:

- Software service development lifecycle methodologies & processes
- Distributed & collaborative software service development
- Service-oriented reference models & frameworks
- Architectural styles & standards for software service systems
- Management & governance of SSE projects
- Models, languages, methods for service-oriented analysis & design
- Costing, valuation & quality metrics of software service design
- Requirements-engineering for software service systems
- Service-oriented business process modeling & management
- SSE for cloud computing environments (incl. IaaS, PaaS & SaaS)
- Validation, verification & testing of software service systems
- Service assembly, composition and aggregation models & languages
- Model-driven SOA & service systems development
- Reverse engineering of software service systems
- Tool support for software service engineering
- Case studies & best practices of service-oriented development
- SEE for context-awareness & mobile devices

IMPORTANT DATES
===============

- Paper Submission Due: September 15th, 2011
- Notification of Acceptance: October 23th, 2011
- Camera-Ready Copy Due: about November 7th, 2011
- Workshop Date: December 5th, 2011

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished research
papers. Papers should be written in English and must not exceed 10
pages, strictly following Springer LNCS style including all text,
references, appendices, and figures. Please, submit papers via the WESOA
conference management tool (see WESOA website) in PDF format. For
formatting instructions and templates see the Springer Web page:

http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the international
program committee. Paper acceptance will be based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity of presentation. Accepted
papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, and circulated to
participants prior to the event. Workshop proceedings will be published
by Springer-Verlag (under negotiation).

At least one author of an accepted paper must register and participate
in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and
procedure of the main ICSOC conference to be found on their website:
http://www.icsoc.org/


ORGANISING COMMITTEE
====================

- George Feuerlicht, Prague University of Economics, CZ
- Winfried Lamersdorf, University of Hamburg, DE
- Guadalupe Ortiz, University of Extremadura, ES
- Christian Zirpins, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DE

- Invited PC Chair: Howard Foster, City University London, GB

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be confirmed)
===================

- Sudhir Agarwal, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DE
- Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, NL
- Djamal Benslimane, LIRIS, FR
- Sami Bhiri, DERI Galway, IE
- Alena Buchalcevova, Prague University of Economics, CZ
- Robert Castaneda, CustomWare, AU
- AnisCharfi, SAP Research CEC Darmstadt, DE
- Jen-Yao Chung, IBM T.J. Watson Research, US
- Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester, GB
- Vincenzo D'andrea, University of Trento, IT
- Florian Daniel, University of Trento, IT
- Valeria de Castro, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, ES
- Keith Duddy, Queensland University of Technology, AU
- Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, AT
- Paul Greenfield, CSIRO, AU
- Birgit Hofreiter, Hochschule Lichtenstein, LI
- Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Stuttgart, DE
- Rannia Khalaf, IBM watson Research, US
- Agnes Koschmieder, University of Karlsruhe, DE
- Mark Little, Red Hat, UK
- E. Michael Maximilien, IBM Almaden Research, US
- Massimo Mecella, Univ. Roma LA SAPIENZA, IT
- Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, DE
- Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks, US
- CesarePautasso, Universitz of Lugano, CH
- Greg Pavlik, Oracle, US
- Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano, I
- Franco Raimondi, University College London, GB
- Wolfgang Reisig, Humboldt-University Berlin, DE
- Norbert Ritter, University of Hamburg, DE
- Colette Rolland, University of Paris, FR
- Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Tilburg University, NL
- Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks, AU
- Olaf Zimmermann, IBM Research Zrich, CH

If you have further queries please email to the workshop chairs on:
chairs wesoa.org

Japanese Disaster Aid

Latest from the New York Times.

Please consider giving relief aid to Japan for the worst disaster since the second world war. Appended is a list of relief agencies accepting donations for Japanese relief work compiled by the Associated Press:

U.S. organizations accepting donations to assist Japan included:

Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA)

Donations: 800-424-ADRA (2372)

Donations address: ADRA International, 12501 Old Columbia Pike, Silver Spring MD 20904

Website: http://www.adra.org

All Hands Volunteers

Donations: 919-830-3573

Donations address: PO Box 546, Carlisle MA 01741

Website: http://www.hands.org/donate/japan-tsunami

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

Donations: 212-687-6200

Donations address: 132 E. 43rd St PO Box 530, New York NY 10017

Website: http://jdc.org

American Red Cross

Donations: 1-800-RED-CROSS

Donations address: PO Box 37243, Washington DC 20013

Website: http://www.redcross.org

AmeriCares

Donations: 203-658-9500

Donations address: 88 Hamilton Ave, Stamford CT 06902

Website: http://americares.org

Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team (AMURT)

Donations: 301-738-7122

Donations address: AMURT, 2502 Lindley Ter, Rockville MD 20850

Website: http://amurt.us

Baptist World Alliance/Baptist World Aid

Donations: 703-790-8980

Donations address: 405 N. Washington St, Falls Church VA 22046

Website: http://www.bwanet.org

Brother's Brother Foundation

Donations: 412-321-3160

Donations address: 1200 Galveston Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15233

Website: http://brothersbrother.org

Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation

Donations: 1-888-989-8244

Donations address: Tzu Chi USA HQ, 1100 S Valley Center Ave, San Dimas CA 91773

Website: http://www.us.tzuchi.org/usa/home.nsf/other/donateCharity

Catholic Relief Services

Donations: 1-877-HELP-CRS

Donations address: PO Box 17090, Baltimore MD 21203-7090

Website: http://crs.org

Christian Reformed World Relief Committee

Donations: 800-55-CRWRC

Donations address: CRWRC, 2850 Kalamazoo Ave SE, Grand Rapids MI 49560-0600

Website: http://www.crwrc.org

Church World Service

Donations: 1-800-297-1516

Donations address: PO Box 968, Elkhart IN 46515

Website: http://www.churchworldservice.org

Direct Relief International

Donations: 805-964-4767

Donations address: 27 S. La Patera Ln, Santa Barbara CA 93117

Website: http://www.DirectRelief.org

Giving Children Hope

Donations: 714-523-4454

Donations address: 8332 Commonwealth Ave, Buena Park CA 90621

Website: http://gchope.org

Habitat for Humanity International

Donations: 1-800-Habitat

Donations address: 270 Peachtree St NW Suite 1300, Atlanta GA 30303-1263

Website: http://habitat.org

International Medical Corps

Donations: 800-481-4462

Donations address: 1919 Santa Monica Blvd Suite 400, Santa Monica CA 90404

Website: http://internationalmedicalcorps.org

International Rescue Committee

Donations: 1-877-REFUGEE (733-8433)

Donations address: 122 E. 42nd St, New York NY 10168

Website: http://www.rescue.org

Mercy Corps

Donations: 800-852-2100

Donations address: Dept. NR, PO Box 2669, Portland OR 97208

Website: https://www.mercycorps.org/donate/japan

Operation Blessing

Donations: 800-730-2537

Donations address: 977 Centerville Tpke, Virginia Beach VA 23463

Website: http://www.operationblessing.org

Relief International

Donations: 310-478-1200

Donations address: 5455 Wilshire Blvd Suite 1280, Los Angeles CA 90036

Website: http://www.ri.org

Save the Children

Donations: 1-800-728-3843

Donations address: 54 Wilton Rd, Westport CT 06880

Website: http://savethechildren.org

World Vision, U.S.

Donations: 1-800-777-5777

Donations address: Federal Way, WA 98063

Website: http://www.worldvision.org

Source: InterAction, www.interaction.org

I'll note also IOCC, who we've had personal contact with and know their work is reliable:

Website: http://www.iocc.org

Money for nothing

A few years back I participated in a study on early stage investing in Russia - motivated by the fact that there is a lot of money staged by both the Russian government and Russian investors. What's become even more intriguing since then is the flow of Russian money to Silicon Valley investments - DST-Facebook investments getting the most attention recently. These high value deals are definitely bold and working - for now.

The latest news is the super cheap angel funding that Yuri Milner is engineering. Whether this is sustainable long term is hard to say, but this will surely shake things up around here for the foreseeable future. One thing is certain: the already hot startup environment just got a lot hotter.

Feedly: the iPhone just got a lot better

For several years, I've been using Feedly on my personal computer to quickly browse across lots of content from news feeds, blogs, and other sites of interest. It's been a very handy way to keep up on information from lots of sources without getting bogged down - scan lots of feed titles and previews and dive in on items that seem interesting.

But my usage patterns with Feedly have been uneven - primarily because I don't have much time to sit and scan on my pc - I'm either doing meetings, working on documents or trying to stay on top of email during the day. My "dead time" tends to be "in between" times like running between office buildings. That's when I'll check news feeds to see what's going on in industry or the world. Typically, it means manually browsing to reliable sites - which is not all that convenient.

Well, now Feedly is available on the iPhone and things just got a lot better for me. I can manage all my feeds through the desktop, but take advantage of very quickly scanning information over hundreds of sources. It's now virtually the only iPhone app that I use regularly and I don't lose any time. In fact, since I've been playing with it, I really haven't needed to open Safari at all. My only "wish" for Feedly is that the digest would show the latest feed entry for each source by title, which would save me some wasted navigation. For me, this is all about getting the right information to me quickly.

A seriously great app that bridges all my normal working environments seamlessly. Highly recommended - thanks Edwin and company for pulling this off!

WESOA 2010 - SF December 7th

This year, both the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing and the long running companion Workshop on Engineering Service Oriented Applications will be in San Francisco. I have had a long involvement with both as a program committee member, presenter and author and have always found them to be valuable as an attendee. I am particularly pleased this year that the program is in the bay area, as it is bound to bring out some very smart and very "plugged in" participants from the vendor community.

In any case, I'll be delivering the keynote presentation for the WESOA conference, so please stop by if you are there. I have not been able to attend in person since Amsterdam, so this will be a real pleasure and I hope to see you there.

Oracle SOA 11g Books

I'm impressed: a list of books that have been published for users of Oracle SOA and BPM portfolio products. I'm very proud to know many of the authors as friends and most of the developers.

Getting Started with Oracle SOA Suite 11g - A Hands on Tutorial

Oracle SOA 11g Handbook

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Developers Guide

The Definitive Guide to SOA Oracle Service Bus

WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Getting Started with Oracle BPM Suite 11g - A Hands on Tutorial

OpenWorld Focus on SOA

Hope to see many long time and new friends and colleagues at Open World and JavaOne this year. Take a look at the Focus on SOA document to get oriented this year.

Warming Trends: a taste of things to come?

While I was in Moscow a few weeks back, the temperatures were stably higher than anything ever experienced in the history of record keeping: temperatures were literally unbearable. Traveling to India after that - where temperatures were thankfully cooler - I was impressed by exactly how difficult it will be for any country including more recently developed countries to put the brakes on the rate of increase of consumption of fossil fuels.

This brief news article describing the temperature trends and fires in Russia as a result of climate change is worth reading in its entirety. It does not do justice to the fires themselves and the havoc they are wreaking. A taste of things to come?

"Meteorologists say air temperature in central Russia by Friday might reach 41 degrees Celsius, which is likely to cause more forest fires in the region.

The recent sporadic rains in central Russian regions have not been brought by a cold weather front, so there is no hope for the drop of air temperatures, an official from the Russian meteorological service said yesterday.

“On the contrary, we expect that air temperature will go up to 41 degrees Celsius by Friday,” he added.

He also said that according to Internet-modelled forecasts, the weather might change after August 8, although such forecasts cannot be fully trusted. “The possibility of an error considerably increases starting from the forecast’s fifth day, so its accuracy nears zero by the eights day,” he said and once again confirmed that short-term forecasts testify to hot weather.

Meteorologists also say the winds are likely to change direction from south-eastern to south-western, thus bringing Mediterranean rains. Moreover, thanks to such winds smoke from peat-bog fires will go to less populated areas.

Meanwhile, according to the Russian Emergencies Ministry, a total of 227 wildfires were registered in central Russian regions in the past 24 hours. The bulk of fires, 130, were registered in the Moscow region, 48 was the tally in the Vladimir region, 9 in the Voronezh region, and another 9 in the Ryazan region. The total area hit by wildfires is 11,038 hectares. "

Source: The Hindu

ICSOC 2010

Just a brief note to remind people that the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing will be in the San Francisco Bay Area this year. I have for a long time worked with ICSOC - as a program committee member on the industrial track, in several workshops, panels and papers. It is the best conference combining industry and academic participants on the topic of service orientation in my opinion.

Russian Tech Center

More on the efforts to draw outside capital and pull back talent in the developing technical center outside Moscow, covered by the NY Times. I'm thinking that President Medvedev is a bit over-optimistic about the influence of word of mouth here...

A recap meeting on the American VC trip spotlighted in the Times article will be held this week in Palo Alto. Details linked.

Taterware

Another great green idea: disposable utensils made from potato starch and limestone. Breaks down in 60-90 days. They are using them at Oracle HQ cafeterias - I'm going to have to drop in and see how they perform.

One reason Exadata is so cool

Flash cache. This video barely scratches the surface, but Exadata is one of the best examples of hardware-meets-software done right.

Andrei Voznesensky, RIP

The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky has just reposed. I always feel a special loss when we lose a poet of quality - the ability to speak to the human condition (not to say to understand it) is a remarkably rare thing, that requires the language of metaphor and analogy rather than forceful syllogisms. This is why poets are the only people that can provide us relief and protection from scientists, politicians and economists - the classes that I am a part of and that so often despise our humanity. Somehow this contrast was sharpened rather than lost in the revolution - I am thinking of many writers now, not just (or primarily) of Voznesensky.

One evening this week, I will try my hand at translating я Гойя ("I am Goya") and post the results, with apologies in advance for the damage I do. I may intersperse the phonetic Russian to give a feel for the force of the poem.

250 Million US PE in Skolkovo

Interesting play from Sigular Guff and Company - the deal centers on infrastructure and services for what will surely be an area with a high level of investment for IT.

Larry on Oracle+Sun

Gotta love the candor.

Brazilian growth outpacing India and China

For those in the Bay Area whose economic radar hasn't been working of late, Brazil's economy, the largest in South America, expanded by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2010, outpacing China and India. Click through to read the whole piece.

Oracle BPM 11gR1

April 27th marked the release of the Oracle BPM platform, which is, I believe, a bit more revolutionary than evolutionary for this space. I wanted to quickly copy some feedback from one of our partners (Hajo Normann - a SOA expert and ACE director - to give a feel for exactly what is differentiating about this product:

"“I just attended a preview workshop on BPM Studio, Oracle's BPMN 2.0 tool, held by Clemens Utschig Utschig from Oracle HQ. The usability and ease to get started are impressive. In the business view analysts can intuitively start modeling, then developers refine in their own, more technical view. The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends. With BPM Studio we architects have a new modeling and development IDE that gives us interesting design challenges to grasp and elaborate, since many things BPMN 2.0 are different from good ol' BPEL. For example, for simple transformations, you don't use BPEL "assign" any more, but add the transformation directly to the service call. There is much less XPath involved. And, there is no translation from model to BPEL code anymore, so the awkward process model to BPEL roundtrip, which never really worked as well as it looked on marketing slides, is obsolete: With BPMN 2.0 "the model is the code". Now, these are great times to start the journey into BPM! Some tips: Start Projects smoothly, with initial processes being not overly complex and not using the more esoteric areas of BPMN, to manage the learning path and to stay successful with each iteration. Verify non functional requirements by conducting performance and load tests early. As mentioned above, separate all technical integration logic into SOA Suite or Oracle Service Bus. And - share your experience!” "

The eternal problem with BPM has been the disconnect between business-user ease of use and the technological bridge to interface with real systems. Oracle's new BPM release starts to remove this barrier and is in many ways the first product set in the market to provide a truly integrated system for automating core business processes across human-centered workflows and IT systems.

JavaOne Call for Papers open

This year should be one of the most interesting in a decade.

Buzz opt out

Apologies for the mundane posting, but if you find the sudden appearance of Google Buzz has you thinking of dropping gmail - there is a "turn off buzz" button at the bottom of the gmail screen. It works just fine: glad to have it gone.

Haiti Aid

If you read this, please consider donating to help the victims of earthquake in Haiti. This blog entry links to the Red Cross.

Worthwhile bay area music - for families

I had the opportunity to attend a performance of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra Sunday in a special performance aimed at children. Donato Cabrera conducted. The young performers really did an outstanding job: tight if not quite soulful, they exceeded my expectations. The overall program was great fun - interactive, with clapping and singing. The main classical settings featured works by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, two wonderful Russian composers. The capstone was a story-narration by Linda Ronstadt set to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, Opus 67. If you have children these performances strike me as a great way to develop a love of great music and are highly recommended.

Our family is planning to attend (and sponsor) at least one of three upcoming performances in the bay area of a selection of Russian choral music (for which I have more than a soft spot). The concert is called NEVER SETTING LIGHT: A Day of Sacred Song in the Russian Choral Tradition and includes "a capella selections from the services of a liturgical day -- from sunset to sunrise. The ancient lyrics are set to the music of Russian and American choral masters from the 18th century to the present, including 5 pieces by northern California composers."

Performances:

Saturday, Feb. 20th Livermore - Asbury Methodist Church

Saturday, Feb 27th Oakland - Ascension Greek Cathedral

Sunday, Feb 28th Fremont - Mission San Jose

I expect these will be settings more traditional than, say, Rachmaninov's, Liturgy of St. John, but I am very much looking forward to these performances.

svod 2009

This year's Silicon Valley Open Doors conference linking Russian technologists and Silicon Valley is scheduled for December 9-10 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Prior year participants and speakers I've known for some time have been consistently impressed with this event.

http://www.svod.org/2009/announcement

OpenWorld 2009

This year's show has an almost electric feel to it: lots of enthusiasm and excitement about the 11g middleware offering, which is great to see up close. Kudos to Clemens Utschig for pulling together a great technical deep-dive session on SOA suite 11g today.

You can watch keynotes live or recorded by following this link.